Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a transformation and quantization architecture for video coding and decoding.
Description of the Related Art
Video compression, i.e., video coding, is an essential enabler for digital video products as it enables the storage and transmission of digital video. In general, video compression techniques apply prediction, transformation, quantization, and entropy coding to sequential blocks of pixels in a video sequence to compress, i.e., encode, the video sequence.
In the emerging next generation video coding standard currently under development by a Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) established by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) that is commonly referred to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), discrete cosine transforms (DCT) are proposed with the following blocks sizes: 4×4, 8×8, 16×16, 32×32 and 64×64. In addition, directional transforms are proposed that will require full matrix multiplication. While large block size transforms such as 16×16, 32×32 and 64×64 DCTs and directional transforms improve coding efficiency, using such transforms increases implementation complexity significantly. Accordingly, improvements in implementation complexity of large block transforms and directional transforms are needed to ensure the feasibility of HEVC implementations.
Further, hardware codecs are expected to play an important role in deployment of HEVC solutions since HEVC is explicitly designed for use on video sequences with high definition and above video resolution. Hardware acceleration for video compression is already standard in desktop, mobile, and portable devices. In software, HEVC codecs are expected to run on processors that support extensive SIMD (single instruction multiple data) operations. Already, 8-way SIMD architectures are becoming commonplace. Hence, transform architectures that are efficient to implement in both hardware and in software on SIMD machines are also needed.